DEAR allows you to upload product photos in bulk via CSV file, using links to your image hosting provider.  

The image URL shared must be a link that has public access. If it is a private link or has security measures we cannot convert that link to our CDN (DEAR link). We save the image in DEAR by converting that image link to a DEAR link.

Any link can be used but it has to be publicly accessible. Once images have been imported to DEAR the privacy settings can be changed back to private. 

Table of Contents:

• Dropbox
• Google Drive

Dropbox

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In this example, we will use Dropbox as the image host. You will need to export the Images & Attachments CSV file (Inventory → Products → Export → Images & Attachments). You will need the Inventory: Products & Families permission in order to do this.

1. Generate a link of the image file from Dropbox. 
   • NOTE: This is not a direct link to the image file itself, but rather to an interstitial page that frames the image and gives you options for downloading the file, etc. Not embeddable at all. But this will be fixed in the next step!
     
2. After you copy the public Dropbox link to your clipboard, just change ?dl=0 to ?raw=1 at the end of the URL. This will change the link to one that will work. The link should look like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mn5smjgwtlbndqu/dropbox-dropdown.png?raw=1
   • If using a different hosting provider for your images, please check what URL you should use with your hosting provider to access it publicly i.e. any user can access image using url with out log in to hosting provided.
3. Enter the image URL and file names into the downloaded Images & Attachments CSV template.
4. Click Inventory → Products → Import → Images & Attachments to upload the CSV file back into DEAR and update your product images. 

Google Drive

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Google Drive images were previously supported, however, changes in Google Drive API means that this is now only available through a fairly complex and time-consuming workaround. We recommend using Dropbox for image upload if possible. 

It is possible to change the Google Drive URL as follows and then upload images from Google Drive using a CSV file. This is what the default image URL provided from Google Drive looks like:

This File ID should be added to the end of a different URL: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=

The amended URL then looks like: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1dz03s56XdDXOMbzqg6u1XU-ftNv9_as9

NOTE: Google Drive links must be shared with visibility to Anyone with the link for this trick to work.

Follow these steps:

1. Populate the CSV file using the default image URLs provided by Google Drive.
2. You may use Find & Replace option to change the default URLs with the correct amended URLs as shown below:
   
   • Find what: https://drive.google.com/file/d/
   • Replace with: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=
3. Next, remove the unwanted characters which appear after file ID also using find and replace:
   
   • Find what: /view?usp=sharing
   • Replace with: